Two men who fraudulently resold tickets to various events, including Ed Sheeran concerts and the Harry Potter And The Cursed Child play, have been ordered to pay back more than £6m.
Ticket touts Peter Hunter, 53, and David Thomas Smith, 68, were prosecuted and sentenced to prison terms in February 2020, but were handed the confiscation order on Wednesday.
Hunter was sentenced to four years in prison in 2020 while Smith was handed a 30-month sentence.
Appearing at Leeds Crown Court on Wednesday, Hunter and Smith were found to have benefited from their crimes by a total of £8,750,732.00.
They were told they needed to repay a total of £6,167,522.02 in the next three months or face an additional eight years in prison.
The pair ran BZZ Limited, a multi-million pound limited company, which they used to purchase and resell hundreds of tickets at inflated prices for events such as concerts by Madness, McBusted and other mainstream acts.
The hearing marked the latest in a line of cases associated with the UK’s first successful convictions against a company fraudulently reselling tickets on a large scale.
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Hunter and Smith committed their offences between May 2010 and December 2017, and in the last 32 months of their operation, they made a net profit of £3.5m.
National Trading Standards (NTS) said the men deployed at least 97 different names, 88 postal addresses and more than 290 email addresses to evade ticket-selling platform restrictions.
Their actions meant “thousands of people” were denied the opportunity to purchase tickets at face value, while others were sold invalid and overpriced tickets, according to NTS.
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“Today’s result concludes a landmark case that demonstrates once and for all that dishonestly buying large quantities of tickets and reselling them at inflated prices is an unacceptable, illegal and fraudulent practice,” said Ruth Andrews, regional investigations and eCrime manager at NTS.
“All too often, fans looking to buy tickets to sport events, music concerts and other high-profile events find that official tickets sell out in minutes before reappearing on secondary ticketing sites at vastly inflated prices.
“This can have a significant financial impact on consumers and I hope this ground-breaking case helps drive long-term changes in the secondary ticketing market.”
